“To say that one is ‘longing for darkness’ is
to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings
balance, wholeness, integration.”

China Galland is the award winning author of Love Cemetery and Longing
for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, the new edition of
which was published simultaneously by Penguin in 2007 with Love
Cemetery to celebrate Galland's work. Her book, The Bond
Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion was a finalist
for the "Best Spiritual Book" award for a Better Life.

Galland is one of the world's foremost authorities on the Black or
Dark Madonnas.
China has traveled all throughout Europe to the shrines of the Black
Madonna. The Black Madonnas are dark-skinned icons of the Virgin
Mary, and for China, they serve as a corrective to the omnipresent
images of God as white-skinned and male.
In her book, Longing for Darkness, China relates that, “Mary
is also God: unacknowledged, female and dark. She is the Mother of
God.” China found on her pilgrimage that there is a positive and
essential aspect to the dark. There is a dark, divine feminine that
has been left unrecognized.

During her pilgrimage, and in her work, China was able to go into
the depths of her being and find what the darkness had to give her-
a transformative connection to the divine. And by bringing wholeness
to her life, China has given all of us a more complete vision of
God, a vision of Mary’s dark face as the feminine face of God.